


Baz on Moony

by PeregrineBones



Category: Carry On - Rainbow Rowell, Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Crossover, Depression, Friendship, M/M, Reunions, Suicidal Thoughts, Vampires, Werewolves
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-11-17
Updated: 2016-11-17
Packaged: 2018-08-31 09:56:53
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,447
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/8573857
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/PeregrineBones/pseuds/PeregrineBones
Summary: A werewolf and a vampire meet in London. They are both heartbroken, and their friendship helps them heal.





	

It really wasn’t too bad at first.

 

In a way, when Simon left, I was ready for it. I was curious, for one thing. Neither of us had ever been with anyone else. Everything we did in bed we had pretty much worked out for ourselves. And it was fine, it was great at times. I don’t think either of us realized, at the time, how good we had it. I was curious, and so was he. So at first there was that thrill. Looking, flirting, magnetic attraction to a stranger, a world of beautiful possibilities. London at that time was a bit of a playground, and it was easy to get lost in it. What I wasn’t prepared for was how lonely it would make me feel.

 

I never spent the night. Sleeping beside a stranger, listening to the blood coursing through their veins, well, I couldn’t do it. With Simon, it used to soothe me, make me feel more human somehow. With someone I did not love, it just made me feel hungry.

 

When I met Moony, things got marginally better for a while. We were never lovers, I’m not sure why. He’s not my type for one thing. I get it that he has a following, but that tweedy intensity isn’t really for me. I think he was a little bit interested in me at first, but, at that phase of his life, Moony was interested in just about anything in trousers. In any case, we both quickly realized that we needed each other as friends more than as lovers, and any sexual tension quickly died away.

 

The first thing I noticed about him was the smell, or rather, the absence of it.

 

I met him at a Barnes and Noble which I had gone into mostly for the lack of a better way to pass the time. He was working there, one in a long series of menial jobs he took to make ends meet. He was at the register. I was waiting in one of those tedious multi-cashier lines. It was just before Christmas and they were busy. The holiday music was blaring. When my turn came I handed him my books and then stood stock still as I noticed it. There was no smell. All humans, magic or not smell … attractive to me. Walking around London is like being assaulted by a thousand different scents from the most delicious buffet that you can never taste. Of course I am used to it, I am very good at ignoring it. I couldn’t manage to do what I do every day if I wasn’t. But this man, ringing up my books, handling them with long elegant fingers, just simply did not smell like a bag of blood to me. I wondered for a moment if he was a vampire. He fit the type - slim and pale. But the few vampires I have met, I have smelled the blood on their breath. Not the sweet smell of living blood coursing through human veins, but the fetid odor of old blood stuck under fingernails and between teeth. I may smell that way myself for all I know, though I am compulsive about hygiene. He didn’t smell of blood at all. It was more animal, almost like a dog, with the scent of air and woods, like someone who spent a lot of time outdoors though he didn’t seem the type. I didn’t recognize it as the smell of a werewolf. I had never met one before. Then I smelled the magic on him.

 

I saw his nostrils flare and realized he, too, must have caught a scent of something unusual off of me. As he handed me my books I grabbed his fingers. They were warm.

 

“We should meet,” I said quietly. “Get together and talk.”

 

He looked at me for a moment, summing me up. Then he nodded once.“I get off in an hour,” he said. “You could meet me at the front entrance and we could go for a drink if you like.”

 

I extended a hand. “Basilton Pitch," I introduced myself. “Though my friends call me Baz.”

 

“Remus,” he said, shaking my hand. “Remus Lupin. Though my friends call me Moony.”

 

He gestured with his eyes to the impatient line of customers behind me and I took my leave.

 

I wasn’t sure if he was gay or straight. I honestly hadn’t been thinking about it when I introduced myself, though it’s usually the first thing I notice about a person. Though of course, as it turned out, being gay was only one of a number of things we had in common.

 

He knew right away that I was a vampire. If it bothered him, he never let on.

 

We had a lot of fun together. We’d get together at his place or mine, cook a meal, share a bottle of wine and go out to the clubs. We’d egg each other on; one of us would choose the most fantastically beautiful boy in the place and try to catch his eye, get a dance, a kiss, a shag. As often as not we’d sit at the bar all night and just people watch and make snarky comments to each other. Moony has a fabulous dry sense of humor. He could always crack me up with a raise of an eyebrow or that half smile of his, still can to this day. Sometimes we’d have a quiet dinner out and just talk. Moony is a real intellectual. He can talk magical theory all night, and he’s educated himself extensively in lycanthropy and vampirism, areas in which we both share an obvious interest.It was an exciting field at the time. Things were happening. Moony was following the development of the Wolfsbane potion closely, of course, but there were other advances in the field of lycanthropy that had interesting implications for vampires as well. There were obvious similarities in terms of the transmission and the physical change that take place. Moony had spent three years in Transylvania, as a research assistant and student at the great Institute of Lycanthropy that had been there for centuries. He knew all about the latest research that was going on there, which was leagues ahead of anything that was happening in Britain. We could spend a whole evening talking about these topics. It was great fun, and it fed a part of my mind I hadn’t really used since leaving school. It got me interested for the first time in magical academics, something I had never thought much about before.

 

And of course, we shared our stories. It didn’t take long for me to see that he was at least as traumatized by what had happened to him as I was by what had happened to me. Although I would say he was a little further along in the process, more resigned to moving on, to a life without his Sirius, than I was to a life without Simon. But it had been years for him, and apparently the early ones had been horrible. In the end, the difference was negligible. We were both living lives that had been irreparably broken, and we found a terrible brotherhood in that fact.

 

So for a while, after meeting Moony, I really thought I was going to be okay. I would get over Simon, I told myself. There were other fish in the sea. I would meet someone else that I could love, that could keep me this side of human.

 

It didn’t work out that way. I tried, I really did. I stopped going to clubs, started asking out people I might actually have something in common with. It was easy enough to get a date. But nothing ever went anywhere. After two or three times I’d just lose interest, or they would. I started to sink into a new place of despair, and I started to realize I wasn’t going to be able to get myself out of it. It just wore me out after a while, shagging a stranger, smelling the blood, knowing I could never taste it. When I started wanting the blood more than the sex I knew I was in trouble, and I just stopped going out. Just went to work, went home, hunted when I had to, tried to make myself eat. I was losing weight. I knew I looked ragged. I felt terrible.

 

Moony had a new boyfriend at the time, a beautiful Ethiopian with chocolate skin and high cheekbones and eyes like deep brown pools. A normal. They were having a domestic interlude and Moony wasn’t really hanging around very much or he probably would have noticed how bad I was getting. Missing Simon was a constant ache, like needing to drink after not hunting for a few days, but worse because there was nothing I could do about it. We never called each other - we had talked on the phone a lot the first year or so after we broke up, then it had all just gotten too confusing. We made a pact not to call the other one unless we were sure we wanted to give it another go and get back together. Which of course, by then I did, wanted to desperately, but I was too afraid to call. Last time I’d talked to Simon he had been dating a woman. I was in touch with Penny on a fairly regular basis so I knew he wasn’t married or anything, I knew he was living in New York near Penny and that Med school was going well for him, but I didn’t know any of the essential facts like whether he was seeing anyone or whether he missed me.

 

I had taken to playing with fire. Just a bit at first, lighting matches, conjuring a circle of flame and letting it tickle my fingers. There was a fireplace in my flat, and sometimes I’d light a fire in there, see how close I could stand to hold my hands, singe the hairs on my arm a little. I’d smoke a cigarette and let the ash drift down and burn little holes in my trousers. I really wanted to end it, to tell you the truth. I just didn’t have the nerve.

 

The night Penny called from New York I hadn’t hunted in four nights and I’d been drinking a little as well. I felt really close, like I might just end it finally. I don’t know what would have happened if I’d gone without blood much longer; I had never actually made it that long before, and I felt too lightheaded to hunt. Penny later said she didn’t know why she called that night, just a feeling. She’d been worried about me for a while anyway. I was pretty incoherent on the phone, just started crying when I heard her voice.

 

“Bunce,” I said at last.

 

“Baz,” I heard her breathe on the other end of the line.

 

“I’m not going to make it,” I eked out.

 

“Yes you are,” she said at once.

 

“I miss him too much.”

 

“He misses you too.” Her words hung there, on the phone, across the Atlantic. I wasn’t expecting that.

 

“How do you know?” I said at last.

 

“How could I not know,” she said impatiently. “ I know Simon. It’s obvious.”

 

“Where is he?”

 

“He’s… away right now. He’s doing field work in Haiti. But he should be back any time now. Baz?”

 

“What?”

 

“I want you to come here.”

 

“To New York?”

 

“Yes. I’m booking you a flight as soon as I get off the phone. You can stay with me and Micah until Simon gets back. He should be here any day now.”

 

“What’s he doing in Haiti?”

 

“It’s complicated. But good. You’ll like it. I’ll explain when you get here.”

 

“What if he doesn’t want to see me?”

 

“That’s just it, he does want to see you.”

 

“How do you know?”

 

“I just do, all right? He’s told me so, for one thing, and I can see how lonely he is. He misses you Baz. Who can I call in London to stay with you and get you on a plane?”

 

So I gave her Moony’s number. Luckily he keeps a phone at his flat, which is just a room in a grungy share over by Paddington Station.

 

He was there in half an hour. He must have apparated, to get there so quickly. He took one look at me and said “When did you hunt last?”

 

“Four days,” I croaked out. My voice was really croaky.

 

He took my lighter and my wand and poured the rest of my vodka down the sink. “Don’t do anything stupid,” he said. “I’ll be back as soon as I can.”

 

He came back with two large rabbits and three squirrels in a sack. They smelled so good that for a moment I thought I might throw up.

 

“Don’t watch,” I said. My mouth was watering. I turned my head away so he couldn’t see my teeth - my fangs had all ready popped.

 

“Fine,” he said and went into the kitchen and started banging around.

 

After I was done with the animals I put the carcasses back in the sack and Moony vanished it with his wand. He made me eat scrambled eggs and drink a cup of tea and by then I was so knackered he had to help me into bed. I probably would have slept for twenty four hours but before I was really ready, Moony was shaking me awake and shoving me into the shower and helping me pack a bag for New York.

 

“You’d best hunt again before we leave,” he said.

 

“We?”

 

“I’m going with you.” He shrugged. “Penny invited me, and I’ve never seen New York.”

 

“What about your Ethiopian?”

 

He smiled. “He’ll be all right. That was lovely but it was kind of winding down. I popped out while you were sleeping and packed a bag and said goodbye.”

 

I was glad he was going with me. Moony felt like an island of safety just then in a very tenuous world. “Can I have my wand back?”

 

He looked me over critically. “You better now?”

 

“Yes, I think so.”

 

He reached into his coat pocket and handed me my wand without a word.

 

We stopped at the park before we left London. Moony sat on a bench, reading a paper in the chilly winter air, while I went into the bushes and found a few squirrels to drain. Then we got in a cab, and headed for Heathrow, and New York and Simon.


End file.
